8 Picks
“Barry Lyndon,, if you can stay awake through this entire movie, you have a sleep disorder.”
“Shampoo. As a single guy, I can relate to this movie a lot. In the book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, there's a story about how Warren and Jack Nicholson were gonna send a kid to med school to be their own private doctor. It's one of my favorite anecdotes about Hollywood access and like a legit good idea.”
“You, Me and Everyone We Know, it captures the loneliness of childhood. Truly like no other book, video, television show, just a masterpiece.”
“A Face in the Crowd. Andy Griffith. Yeah, Andy Griffith, Matlock. He's so goddamn good in this movie, and apparently he yelled at the director at the end that he'd made him lose his mind.”
“Paris is Burning. The Comedian John Mullaney can do entire monologues from this movie in their entirety. He will sometimes text them to me 'cause I said, 'it's giving businessman' or something. And then he does the entire... Paris is Burning, a true masterpiece and a really well-made documentary.”
“Spike Lee, Bamboozled. Spike Lee, one of my personal heroes... He's the reason I went to film school because he was doing press for Do the Right Thing in 1989. And he mentioned film school... I created Chappelle's Show with Dave and Spike did a sketch one time... He has a thing on his set. If a cell phone goes off, you pay the director 20 bucks. I paid him 20 bucks 'cause he's Spike Lee, but he is great.”
“Bringing Up Baby. A great illustration of how men interact with women. Baby is a leopard that she brings with her everywhere she goes... And The Leopard represents femininity. And Cary Grant is just trying to figure out, how am I gonna deal with this woman? It's like a triple metaphor, basically. It's like a metaphor thrice removed. It's fucking insane that 86 years ago, they made a movie where a woman brings a tiger everywhere she goes.”
“Menace II Society. Allen and Albert Hughes. I now am buddies with Allen. He told me an anecdote about this movie one time that at one point it was so bad, he had a rag in his car to wipe tears with. It was, he would just go to editing. It sucked. And he would drive home and cry the entire way... And it's actually a good, like, lesson in filmmaking... Just the parts of the movie that were good were like spread, like manifest destiny of quality.”